Education "experts" have it all wrong.
Schools will never be "fixed" by treating symptoms. We must get to the cause of the problem!
Like most teachers, much of my time is spent asking, “Why are we focusing on the insignificant and ridiculous, but not helping the students? Why aren’t we concentrating on fixing the problems?” It is like rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. Promises are made to students, and their parents, to do the very best to educate those who come through our doors, yet we are failing. Actually, it is the “experts” who decree how schools work that are the failures and they in turn, cause us to fail. I get sick to my stomach when I read of the next “shiny new penny” applauded by education “experts” while Rome continues to burn. I am not happy.
Be aware, this is not how problems are solved on the outside of schools. Private sector income and existence depends on finding solutions, fixing problems, and increasing productivity. They don’t have months, weeks, or years. Time is a luxury afforded only to those education “experts” advising our administrators what we should do and how we should do it - who are then mandated to comply. The ones who suffer? Students, teachers and parents. For the experts? It’s just another payday. Can someone please tell me one single instance of how the Danielson Framework has helped get their students to class on time, prepared and ready to work?
School slogans like, “We’re family”, are tossed around like pizza dough, but do teachers feel like family when they are made to sit through another meaningless PD devised by “experts” offering no solutions to poor attendance, unpreparedness and missing homework? Teachers are trying their best to stay afloat in a turbulent ocean, and the “experts” keep throwing us anchors! Do you still have poor attendance, poor preparedness and incomplete assignments? Is the “expert” PD advice you received on classroom management helping? Those are classroom management issues and the advice from the “experts” is not fixing these problems, because the experts are wrong!!
Smartboards, laptops, iPhones, dazzling new apps, iReady, youReady, meReady, weReady and those dreaded Zoom meetings with 97% of student cameras “broken” and you still have poor attendance, tardiness, preparedness and achievement? The experts are wrong!!
I read a lot about education reform, but I don’t want reform. Call me crazy but how do you reform teaching? Here is your curriculum, there are your students. Now combine the two! If you know your content, students are on-time, behaved and prepared, teaching is not hard. In fact, it is easy, fun, and exciting! Why would we want to reform teaching? Teaching is not broken. We know how to teach! What is broken is the system responsible for attendance, preparedness and responsibility that is broken! To fix the schools, you need to fix the system. I’ve listened to “school reform” advice for 20+ years only to watch as it gets worse. Please stop me if I’m wrong.
Where’s the beef?
If you know of a journal publication, book, technological advancement, or anything that shows promise for any school fixes, please share it with the rest of the class. If lucky, you may come across an ember of change that glows like an early Thomas Edison light bulb (brightly for a short time, then burns out), but long-term sustainable changes are not on the horizon. Or are they?
Could the problem be that in their search for fixes, the “experts” forgot to look in their own backyards. Is it possible that the answer has been right under their noses all this time? Are they looking in all the wrong places, like looking through the wrong end of the telescope? (Speaking of Edison, isn’t it funny that he found the solution to his light bulb problem in a simple strand of burnt thread? A simple fix where he had tried hundreds of other more sophisticated materials! Could our solutions also be “pencil and paper” based?)
My love of Star Trek tethers me to hope for education’s future. Star Trek’s Federation of Planets is always trying new things, previously untested approaches. If you have a better reason than Captain Kirk and his crew to be optimistic, please let me know. They are always seeking to improve, to make it better – to find a fix to their problems. We have experts, who have poured billions into education, and are still unable to develop viable, universal, solutions to the three simplest, yet most common, problems: arriving to class on-time, arriving to class prepared, and creating a sense of urgency in students. These solutions are available if only schools - and the “experts” - are open to new ideas!
I’ve been waiting for someone to go where no one has gone before and I am now done waiting. I have boarded the Enterprise and am asking you to make the “trek” with me.
I always wanted to teach, and I was blessed to find that teaching was as rewarding and satisfying as doctoring. Two highly successful and extremely rewarding careers in one lifetime – but it got even better. As a new teacher, I really needed help so I found ways to incorporate all the time tested business systems that made my practice successful into the classroom and knew that one day after retirement from teaching I would want to share these experiences and ideas with other teachers. I know, teachers don’t like the word business, but if we continue to do what we have always done, we will continue to get what we have always gotten. Please keep an open mind!
But there’s a catch. Those systems from my practice were not mine. Chiropractic school taught me nothing about how to successfully manage a practice. Just as college teaches all other professionals, teachers included, our trades but not how to effectively manage them. After one year of failure, I signed on with a highly successful management consultant who had a great track record of building success in others. He guided me to wealth, success, and happiness.
My point is that that neither he, nor I, reinvented the wheel. This doctor/management consultant had learned ideas from those who came before him and refined them to make them even better. I then took those ideas – combined them with my personal experiences – and merged them into my classroom and have produced new systems creating great success with students and other teachers who have followed what I have done. This is what a management consultant does.
So what are the experts so desperately wrong about? Dare I say everything? Schools are failing: attendance is down, student achievement is down, and teacher morale is at an all-time low. Parents who can are pulling their children from failing schools and disenchanted educators are leaving the profession. And still, the experts, administrators, and teachers are unwilling to look beyond their hallowed walls of education for solutions. We are still subjected to PD’s telling us how to teach better. When will they see that will not fix our problems? How we teach is not the problem!!
I have seen truly gifted and outstanding teachers (who follow their Danielson Framework Rubrics to the letter) brought to their knees by students who have been “allowed” to wreak havoc day after day. We all know wonderful teachers who have left the profession because of these students. Where are the “experts” when we need them?
Coming from the private sector to the classroom, I brought with me many changes that perfected my on-time attendance, student achievement and morale appreciably! Every one of these ideas came from the business world, so when I suggested to colleagues we use business ideas to fix school problems, you would have thought I splashed holy water on Dracula! Cries of “We are not a business!” “We don’t do it that way!” “We work with children!” “Our kids could never do that!” were among the responses I heard.
One wonders, with all the failure schools are experiencing, why are school “experts” so resistant to change? As Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver fame said, “They’re not stupid, they just don’t know anything.”
So, what should the experts be looking at? Problem solving 101 - the Scientific Method. First, identify the problem. You might say behavior and discipline issues top the list. Wrong! These are only symptoms of much larger underlying problems. We start every school year on a clean slate with high expectations in abundance. Building policies are repeated over the PA system from Day 1. Teachers have both parent and students sign Student Contracts. Life looks good and we are all well on our way to a successful year. Even the “bad kids” are good! So why does it all come crashing down every year? (teachers even have a term for this, “The honeymoon is over.” How sad is this?) Schools lack effective systems necessary to maintain their first day’s successes. Anyone can open a business and have a great first day. It is what they do on the second day that counts! I have developed sound sustainable systems based on Goal Setting, Prioritization, Time Management and Scripting that will make teaching effortless and more effective than ever before!
Schools do not fail for lack of new ideas. They fail because they don’t like ideas that don’t fit their “vision” of what belongs in schools. Unlike the great advancements in the business or science worlds, schools are determined not to make change, because as a great motivational speaker once said, they are, “stuck in their own stuff”. And as a result, it is the teachers who are being thrown to the wolves!
The few small changes made are from “outside in”, when the only path to long term success is from “inside out”. Schools continue to treat symptoms instead of the cause of the problems. This approach will never cure the patient. Lotion is great for dry skin, but will do nothing long term if the body remains severely dehydrated.
The first requirement of an idea for change is originality - a new way of looking at an old problem. Let me show you new and different ways to make long-term sustainable change that will result in greater student successes and higher teacher morale.
Continue reading my School Goals Work posts and please visit my website at
https://www.schoolgoalswork.com/